Western Publishing, also known as Western Printing and Lithographing Company, was a Racine, Wisconsin, firm responsible for publishing the Little Golden Books. Its Golden Books Family Entertainment division also produced children's books and family-related entertainment products. The company had editorial offices in New York City and Los Angeles, California. Western Publishing became Golden Books Family Entertainment in 1996. As of 2013, Little Golden Books remains as an imprint of Penguin Random House.
Sears, Roebuck and Co., commonly known as Sears, is an American chain of department stores founded in 1892 by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck and reincorporated in 1906 by Richard Sears and Julius Rosenwald, with what began as a mail ordering catalog company migrating to opening retail locations in 1925, the first in Chicago. In 2005, the company was bought by the management of the American big box discount chain Kmart, which upon completion of the merger, formed Sears Holdings. Through the 1980s, Sears was the largest retailer in the United States. In 2018, it was the 31st-largest. After several years of declining sales, Sears's parent company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on October 15, 2018. It announced on January 16, 2019, that it had won its bankruptcy auction, and that a reduced number of 425 stores would remain open, including 223 Sears stores.
Sears Canada Inc. was a publicly-traded Canadian company affiliated with the American-based Sears department store chain. In operation from 1952 until January 14, 2018, and headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, the company began as Simpsons-Sears—a joint venture between the Canadian Simpsons department store chain and the American Sears chain—which operated a national mail order business and co-branded Simpsons-Sears stores modelled after those of Sears in the U.S. After the Hudson's Bay Company purchased Simpsons in 1978, the joint venture was dismantled and Hudson's Bay sold its shares in the joint venture to Sears; with Sears now fully owning the company, it was renamed Sears Canada Inc. in 1984. In 1999, Sears Canada acquired the remaining assets and locations of the historic Canadian chain Eaton's. From 2014, Sears Holdings owned a 10% share in the company. ESL Investments was the largest shareholder of Sears Canada.
The Robert Simpson Company Limited, commonly known as Simpson's until 1972, then as Simpsons, and in Quebec sometimes as Simpson, was a Canadian department store chain that had its earliest roots in a store opened in 1858 by Robert Simpson.
The T. Eaton Company Limited, later known as Eaton's and then Eaton, was a Canadian department store chain that was once the largest in the country. It was founded in 1869 in Toronto by Timothy Eaton, an immigrant from what is now Northern Ireland. Eaton's grew to become a retail and social institution in Canada, with stores across the country, buying-offices around the globe, and a mail-order catalog that was found in the homes of most Canadians. A changing economic and retail environment in the late twentieth century, along with mismanagement, culminated in the chain's bankruptcy in 1999.
Montgomery Ward is the name of two successive U.S. retail corporations. The original Montgomery Ward & Co. was a world-pioneering mail-order business and later a leading department store chain that operated between 1872 and 2001. The current Montgomery Ward Inc. is a national online shopping and mail-order catalog retailer that started several years after the original Montgomery Ward shut down.
Western Auto Supply Company—known more widely as Western Auto—was a specialty retail chain of stores that supplied automobile parts and accessories. It operated approximately 1200 stores across the United States. It was started in 1909 in Kansas City, Missouri, by George Pepperdine and Don Abnor Davis. Pepperdine later founded Pepperdine University. Western Auto was bought by Beneficial Corporation in 1961; Western Auto's management led a leveraged buyout in 1985, leading three years later to a sale to Sears. Sears sold most of the company to Advance Auto Parts in 1998, and by 2003, the resulting merger had led to the end of the Western Auto brand and its product distribution network.
Sears Modern Homes were houses sold primarily through mail order catalog by Sears, Roebuck and Co., an American retailer.
Mail order is the buying of goods or services by mail delivery. The buyer places an order for the desired products with the merchant through some remote methods such as:
Spiegel was an American direct marketing retailer founded in 1865 by Joseph Spiegel. Spiegel published a catalog, like its competitors Sears and Montgomery Ward, which advertised various brands of apparel, accessories, and footwear, as well as housewares, toys, tools, firearms, and electronics. Their company brands included Newport News, Shape FX, and Old Kraftsman, among others. They also operated brick-and-mortar stores.
A catalog merchant is a form of retailing. The typical merchant sells a wide variety of household and personal products, with many emphasizing jewelry. Unlike a self-serve retail store, most of the items are not displayed; customers select the products from printed catalogs in the store and fill out an order form. The order is brought to the sales counter, where a clerk retrieves the items from the warehouse area to a payment and checkout station.
The Seth Thomas Clock Company was founded by Seth Thomas and began producing clocks in 1813. It was incorporated as the "Seth Thomas Clock Company" in 1853. The company manufactured clock movements for the Self Winding Clock Company from 1886 thru the early 1890s, in addition to its standard offering of longcase clocks, mantel, wall, and table-top clocks.
The Snark is a line of lightweight sailboats, the most popular of which is the two-person, lateen-rigged sailboat Super Snark manufactured and marketed by Meyers Boat Company of Adrian, Michigan. The Snark was initially marketed by Snark Products, Inc. of Fort Lee, New Jersey and has been marketed with numerous slight variations, most prominently as the Sea Snark, Super Snark and Super Sea Snark. Other Snark models include the Sunchaser, and the Sea Skimmer. Among discontinued Snark models are the Triumph trimaran, the Mach I, the Sundancer and the Sea Swinger.
GAINSCO is a Dallas, Texas-based holding company established in 1978 in Fort Worth, Texas by Joseph Macchia, who resigned from the enterprise in 1998 to pursue other interests.
The Johnson Smith Company was a mail-order company established in 1914 by Alfred Johnson Smith in Chicago, Illinois, USA that sold novelty and gag gift items such as miniature cameras, invisible ink, x-ray goggles, whoopee cushions, fake vomit, and joy buzzers. The company moved from Chicago to Racine, Wisconsin in 1923, to Detroit in the late 1930s, and from the Detroit area to Bradenton, Florida in 1986.
Kit houses, also known as mill-cut houses, pre-cut houses, ready-cut houses,mail order homes, or catalog homes, were a type of housing that was popular in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere in the first half of the 20th century. Kit house manufacturers sold houses in many different plans and styles, from simple bungalows to imposing Colonials, and supplied at a fixed price all materials needed for construction of a particular house, but typically excluding brick, concrete, or masonry. Some house styles, like log cabins and geodesic dome homes, are still sometimes sold in kit form.
The Neils Hogenson home is an original catalogue order house purchased through the T. Eaton’s Co. Catalogue and built by Mr. Neils Hogensen. Shipped from Winnipeg by train, the home came to Stirling in crates with instruction, including shingles, lumber, doors, moldings, windows, paint, nails, hardware and building paper, all this for the cost of about $1,577.00. The home was paid for at the train station and hauled to the site of construction. Today the Neils Hogensen House remains on its original foundation and has become a local landmark, retaining many of the original features from the time it was constructed in 1917.
Aladdin City is an unincorporated community in Miami-Dade County, Florida, United States. It is located about 20 miles (32 km) southwest of Miami within the unincorporated community of Redland. It is notable as the site of a planned community—similar to Opa-locka, Coral Gables, and Miami Springs, Florida—whose development was snuffed out by the abrupt end of the Florida land boom of the 1920s.
Freemans is a British online clothing retailer headquartered in Bradford, England. Freemans offers a range of products, predominantly clothing, footwear and homewares.
Kit houses in Michigan were a type of housing that was largely developed in the US state of Michigan throughout the first half of the 20th century. Michigan was home to the Aladdin Company, the first and longest-lived manufacturer of kit houses in North America, who had sales "in every part of the world, from Saskatchewan to Tahiti". Lewis and Sterling, two other major manufacturers of kit houses, were also based in Michigan.
